Playing Through: A Year of Life and Links Along the Scottish Coast - Softcover

Gillespie, Curtis

3.87

30 ratings by Goodreads

9781400052240: Playing Through: A Year of Life and Links Along the Scottish Coast

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400052246 ISBN 13: 9781400052240

Publisher: Broadway Books, 2005

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A blend of evocative memoir, lyrical travelogue, and passionate golf pilgrimage, Playing Through chronicles the year Curtis Gillespie spent with his family in quaint Gullane, Scotland. A seaside town crammed with championship golf courses, Gullane charmed Gillespie so much as a college student that he vowed to return one day with his father. That journey never came to pass, so thirteen years later Gillespie uprooted his wife and daughters and moved to the small Scottish village, hoping to learn something about himself and the delightfully gruff natives with their peculiarly addicting sport. Against the backdrop of a uniquely beautiful landscape, Playing Through deftly explores the bonds of fatherhood, friendship, and the irresistible lure of links golf, and in the process offers up a story rich in comedy, warmth, and insight.

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From the Inside Flap:

In this lyrical, evocative, and heartfelt memoir, Curtis Gillespie chronicles the year he spent with his wife and daughters in quaint Gullane, Scotland. Against the backdrop of a uniquely beautiful landscape, Gillespie deftly explores the bonds of fatherhood and friendship, and the irresistible lure of links golf.

When Curtis Gillespie first played a round in Gullane, he was a graduate student on the golf team at the University of St. Andrews. He wrote to his father back in Canada about the unmatched peacefulness and loveliness of the place and promised that the two of them would golf there together someday. After his father passed away before they could play the Scottish course, Gillespie vowed to return himself. Thirteen years after his first visit, Gillespie uproots his wife and two young daughters and moves to Gullane, hoping to learn something about himself, and his life, in the process.
Early on Gillespie teams up with two aging local golfers named Archie and Jack (members at Gullane Golf Club for more than a century between them), and the ensuing friendship that blossoms between the elderly Scotsmen and the young Canadian infuses Playing Through with a sense of enchanting familiarity and easygoing charm. Gillespie samples courses like Muirfield and St. Andrews under the delightfully gruff guidance of Archie and Jack, soaks up the natural beauty of the countryside, and sets out to capture the full flavor of village life, haggis and all. The gregarious and eccentric locals, the stunning setting, the town’s history, and even his family’s response to their new life all converge in a warm, wonderful story rich with comedy and insight.

Skillfully interwoven through the narrative are anecdotes about Gillespie’s much-missed father, an ordinary man who inspired extraordinary love from his son. And though his father is not there to share in Gullane’s charms, the experience of moving to the village and coming to know its inhabitants helps Gillespie through an unexpected passage of discovery about his father, himself, and his own journey through fatherhood.

From the Back Cover:

“Gillespie's rendering of the events reminds me of Joe Fiorito's final days with his father in The Closer We are to Dying. I cried while I read that book, and Gillespie had me doing the same thing... This is a crossover book in the best sense of the genre. Golfers will find much to admire in Gillespie's descriptions of the game's "ark of the covenant" in Gullane and other courses in the area. And non-golfers will see a reporter's eye for detail and a novelist's skill for dramatic storytelling. But what might be ignored amid the fluidity of the writing is Gillespie's beautifully realized skill as a memoirist. This is writing thick with detail and dense with introspection...” -- Calgary Herald

“Playing Through is one of those special books that comes along only about as often as your favorite links course appears on the Open Rota -- an elegiac tribute to life’s most wonderful and complex game and the enduring bonds it creates, a beautifully rendered meditation on what it means to be a good son, a loving father, and lasting friend of the game. If I could recommend but one book this year -- this would be it.” -- James Dodson, author of Final Rounds

“Curtis Gillespie is a beautiful writer, with an exquisite touch reminiscent of John Updike. He can describe the ephemera of the natural world and the fragility of human relationships with the same sure hand. Playing Through is a book about golf, history, friendship and the love of family; it is compelling and evocative and memorable in the very best sense.” -- Alistair MacLeod

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